"Nor can they find him."
"Perhaps not immediately, but sooner or later they will."
"Yes?" Ted questioned. "Send a thousand men into the hills, send a thousand into any big thicket, and they wouldn't find him unless they happened to stumble right across him."
"Al can't stay in the hills forever."
"Maybe not, but he can stay there a long time. He knows every chipmunk den in the Mahela."
"He won't be easy to find," the warden conceded, "but he will be found. What time did he come back last night?"
"Just about an hour after you took him away."
Loring Blade exclaimed, "Wow!"
Ted looked quizzically at him and the warden continued, "We were on Dead Man's Curve, and he was between Jack and me, when suddenly he pushed the door open and just seemed to float out of it. We beat the brush around Dead Man's Curve until one o'clock this morning. About then I tumbled to the idea that he must have come back here."
"Why didn't you come last night?"